Useful Pages

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

On August 30, 1942 - 'Zero Night' - 40 Allied officers staged the most audacious mass escape of World War II. Months of meticulous planning and secret training hung in the balance during three minutes of mayhem as the officers boldly stormed the huge double fences at Oflag Prison.

Employing wooden ladders and bridges previously disguised as bookshelves, the highly coordinated effort succeeded and set 36 men free into the German countryside. Later known as the 'Warburg Wire Job', fellow prisoner and fighter ace Douglas Bader once described the attempt as 'the most brilliant escape conception of this war'.

The first author to tackle this remarkable story in detail, historian Mark Felton brilliantly evokes the suspense of the escape and the adventures of those escapees who managed to elude the Germans, as well as the courage of the civilians who risked their lives to help them in enemy territory. Told with a novelist's eye for drama and detail, this rip-roaring adventure is all the more thrilling because it really happened.

Saturday, August 15, 2015

Terms of Enlistmentby Marko Kloos The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth has a population problum. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy welfare tenements, where you're restricted to 2,000 calories of badly flavored soy every day.

You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world, or you can join the service. With the colony lottery a pipe dream, Andrew chooses to enlist in the armed forces for a shot at real food, a retirement bonus, and maybe a ticket off Earth.

But as he starts a career of supposed privilege, he soon learns that the good food and decent health care come at a steep price...and that the settled galaxy holds far greater dangers than military bureaucrats or the gangs that rule the slums.

The debut novel from Marko Kloos, Terms of Enlistment is an entertaining military SF in the tradition of Robert Heinlein, Joe Haldeman, and John Scalzi.

Friday, August 7, 2015

Humankind: How Biology and Geography Shape Human Diversityby Alexander Harcourt Where did the human species originate? why are tropical peoples much more diverse than those at polar latitudes, and why can only Japanese peoples digest seaweed? In Humankind, U. C. Davis professor Alexander Harcourt answers these questions and more, as he explains how the expansion of the human species around the globe and our interaction with our environment explains much about why humans differ from one region of the world to another, not only biologically, but culturally.

What effects have other species had on the distribution of humans around the world, and we, in turn, on their distribution? And how have human populations affected each other's geography, even existence? For the first time in a single book, Alexander Harcourt brings these topics together to help us understand why we are, what we are, where we are.

It turns out that when one looks at humanity's expansion around the world, and in the biological explanations for our geographic diversity, we humans are often just another primate, just another species. Humanity's distribution around the world and the type of organism we are today has been shaped by the same biogeographical forces that shape other species.

The story behind the nature and distribution of humans around the world.

Saturday, August 1, 2015

Come browse our large collection of award winning new and classic foreign films in the Media Room on the first floor of the main library. Films circulate for three weeks and may be reserved at the Reference Desk on the second floor.